Traditionally, producing plans for highway (and other roadway) design involves a number of individual computing programs. Often, the inputs and/or outputs of one program must be converted to a different format in order to be compatible with other programs. For instance, in one aspect, roadway design involves extracting boring samples from a plurality of locations within a geographical boundary of interest (e.g., a highway design corridor) to determine sub-surface geologic composition. The boring samples may then be utilized to create boring logs which may subsequently be plotted in a number of different ways to produce graphical representations of the geotechnical data within the geographical boundary. One way in which such graphical representations may be produced is by utilizing a series of programs in the PLBORING family of programs. Converting the graphical representations (e.g., produced utilizing one or more of the PLBORING programs) to a format that complies with a multitude of varying standards, whether government regulated or imposed by preference, is an additional step that may involve, for instance, a VAX-based family of programs.
To further illustrate the point, a DOS-based program, e.g., gINT, may be utilized during the above process to produce an electronic version of the boring logs. However, in this instance, the gINT input must be converted to a format compatible with the VAX in order to make use of the PLBORING family of programs.
In view of the above, it can be readily appreciated that producing highway design plans utilizing all of these initially non-compatible programs, and making them compatible with one another, is a time-consuming and manually intensive process. Further, personnel that are trained and efficient in using all of the individual programs are limited, further exacerbating the timing issue.